Sims 4 Modding Already Has a Hot, Surprising Trend Which Totally Improves EA's Original Avatars

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Sims 4 modders have really hit the ground running since its release at the beginning of the month. Mods for the game, including recolors of vanilla content already number in the hundreds -- or thousands, if you include the build-in sharing tools that let players browse the rooms, lots, and households made by others. It's been a much smoother period for modders than The Sims 3's launch was, largely because early access to the CAS demo and developer transparency about how the game itself works have allowed experienced modders to get straight to work without having to spend nearly as much time figuring out how.

Amid the usual clothes and hairstyles and furniture and so on, there's one type of mod that's been gaining a lot of ground in spite of its unassuming nature. In fact, you'll find more of these than you will freckle mods or even eyeglass mods. What are they?

They're facial shaders.

Now let's get one thing straight: There are plenty of facial shading/contouring mods for The Sims 3 too, but they took much longer to appear. These enhancements for The Sims 4 are still outnumbered by the more glamorous body mods like complete skins and makeup, but there are far more of them far earlier than there were after The Sims 3 was launched, and there are a few reasons why that might be the case.

First, while it may seem like a bit of a stretch, it's worth noting that contouring is much more present in the minds of even mildly fashion-savvy folks now. Probably due in large part to the rise of the YouTube beauty guru and the amateur makeup artist, many more people are aware of facial contouring/detailing/feature correcting techniques today than even 5 years ago, and all of these techniques translate onto avatar faces. During my time as an avatar fashion blogger for virtual world Blue Mars I even wrote about how to use their native makeup tools to fine-tune the avatar's face.

That brings me to the second point, which is that it's much easier to assemble facial details than to assemble an entire full-body skin. The (eventual) popularity of these sorts of facial enhancements in The Sims 3 may have given modders a little more confidence to take this less labor-intensive route instead.

Finally, there's something which I pointed out in my coverage of the The Sims 4 CAS demo back in July. The Sims 3 allowed players to adjust not only the color but the opacity of each makeup layer, which allowed interested players to tweak their sim's facial structure a little more subtly. I was always partial to adding a layer of sheer white blush to my sim's cheeks to make them look slightly more pronounced, and I often used sheer lipstick layers to correct natural lip color on male and female sims alike. The Sims 4's more rigid makeup system doesn't really allow for any of that without modding, and that could absolutely be a driving force behind this kind of game mod.

If you want to see facial shading mods or any of the other wonderful content that The Sims 4 community has to offer, check out My Sims 4 Blog (it's not mine actually, that's just its name) which has flawless categorization to make browsing a breeze.

(Picture credits: Plumb4, Supertrapbolous, and MissFortune.)

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

Fine, since no one else is going to comment, I'll just say it.

All of these comparison pictures look the same. I don't see a difference.